Indianapolis is still largely new to commuter cycling. We've added miles of bike lanes and we'll have even more by next summer, but that wasn't case just a few years ago. / Star file photo

Written by

What would it take for you to leave your car at home and ride a bike instead? To part ways with the 92 percent of Marion County residents who drive to and from work every day?

As executive director of IndyCog, the cycling advocacy group, Kevin Whited asks himself those questions all the time. And the answers, for the most part, have come slowly.

Sure, the share of commuters riding bikes as opposed to using other forms of transportation increased 150 percent from 2000 to 2009. But we started with almost nothing. We're talking a "jump" of 0.2 percent to 0.5 percent of commuters. In Minneapolis, it's 3 percent and in Portland, Ore., it's 6 percent, according to the American Community Survey.

Indianapolis needs to catch up -- not just because the coveted young-professional-hipster demographic thinks cycling is cool, but because Indiana has one of the highest rates of obesity in the nation. Most Hoosiers could use more exercise.

Enter the Indy Ride Guide.

Available for free at various shops, coffeehouses and brewpubs across Indianapolis (full list: www.theindycog.com/indy-ride-guide), it's a map of the safest greenways, routes and roads for riding in Indianapolis.

"We're really trying to get it into the hands of people who aren't cyclists," Whited said.

People who, for example, become Monon Trail warriors on the weekends. Or who bring their kids Downtown to cruise the Cultural Trail or to ride along the Canal. People who, for legitimate reasons, are scared to share the road with cars -- even those roads with freshly painted bike lanes.

"Hopefully," Whited said of the Indy Ride Guide, "it will be a tool to boost their confidence."

It certainly can't hurt.

Indianapolis is still largely new to commuter cycling. We've added miles of bike lanes and we'll have even more by next summer, but that wasn't case just a few years ago.

Drivers are still getting used to sharing the road with cyclists -- especially in the colder months when many people don't expect to see anyone braving the elements on a bike. It's still common for inattentive drivers to make a right-hand turn without looking, back out of parking spaces in front of cyclists and block bike lanes while waiting at intersections.

Safety is a real barrier to commuting, especially for timid newbies.

So, the Indy Ride Guide addresses those concerns by rating the "bikeability" of our major thoroughfares. It lists -- and color codes -- routes by "most bikeable," "bikeable" and "least bikeable." That way you could map a trip from one side of the city to the other based on how eager you are to avoid ending up in a ditch or on the hood of a car.

The ratings system is based on the Clark Index, an urban planning formula that measures everything from traffic flow to the speed limit to the number of lanes on a road to whether there's parallel parking, a lot of truck traffic or high curbs.

"We actually called Mr. Clark up and said 'Hey, do you mind if we use this index?' " Whited recalled, "and he said, 'People still look at that?' "

IndyCog worked with several city agencies to pull the pertinent data. They filled in the blanks using Google Maps. The goal, Whited said, was to come up with an objective safety rating system first and then tweak it with input from the cycling community.

The result is a city bike map unlike any other in the country.

And what's remarkable is it was put together largely by volunteers like Brian Staresnick, a landscape architect at RATIO during the day and the bike map project manager in his off hours.

"We just kind of had to pull this together after work and on weekends," he said. "But it just goes to show how passionate people in Indianapolis are about alternative transportation."

So far, IndyCog has printed 20,000 maps with funding from the Central Indiana Community Foundation. About 6,000 are gone. This is just the first version, though. The plan is to develop a smartphone app, too -- perhaps with features to determine the bike routes with the least number of potholes, most streetlights and the most frequently plowed in the winter.